Blog o cestovaní nielen po Japonsku / Travel blog

28. October 2014

Travel summary

Well, these are all my train tickets (I am bad in arranging those things, as you can see yourselves)

EN:After all the time I decided to have a look at my Shinkansen and JR tickets, I collected all of them just to know the dates related to the places I visited. The reason is simple – once you get the Japan Rail Pass, you will also receive a pre-paid envelope with a survey, which kindly asks you to fill in the list of places you visited in chronological order, with the dates, if possible. Keeping the tickets is therefore the easiest and the most effective way to keep track with your previous journeys. So I had the tickets. I played with Google Maps a little and I figured out the approximate distance for each of my trips (including the ones I did with my 4-day Kansai Wide Pass from Osaka). The rough list is here:

Well, that’s it. During my 3 months in Japan I travelled almost 13 000 kilometres to see all the sights and places I wanted to see. If you click on the above image, you can spot rather plenty of little yellow stars – they indicate all the places (unless I forgot some of them) I visited. The one on the north is Sapporo and Hokkaido, the one on the bottom/south is Okinawa, of course. Considering most of these journeys (except Okinawa and 4 days of travel plans from Osaka) were fully covered with Japan Rail Pass, you can see by yourself that buying this thing before your visit of Japan is really handy. Just one example – return ticket from Tokyo to Sapporo was worth of 350 eur (one way ticket from Tokyo->Shin-Aomori->Hakodate->Sapporo costs more than 24 000 yen, therefore roughly 175 eur). JR Pass valid for 21 days costs 400 eur including delivery. Do your maths, but believe me – it’s totally worth it.

Mind you – I am not counting small local trips around Tokyo and Osaka – those would be probably hundreds more of kilometres – e.g. I used to live close to the Musashi-Koyama station in the Meguro/Shinagawa area, the route from this station to Sumida – the home of Tokyo Skytree is approximately 16 kilometres long. So the return trip would be around 32 kilometres. But there is no way I could track all my trips like these, as I was using my Suica IC card and that would be a total pain to play with all those data. So I decided to count only long-haul travel.